Collaboration is an important part of the iGEM experience. Some teams may not have access to equipment that other teams may have freely available to them. Through collaboration, teams can accomplish more work together than they could on their own. During the course of our work, we worked with a number of teams, both in and our of the lab.
Boston University WetLab
We worked with Boston University for a lab-based collaboration. The Boston University team perform quantitative analysis on the fluorescence of our wild type and ACG mutant eGFP, both containing a plasmid for RFP to indicate the presence of our guide RNA. The flow cytometry data obtained from this collaboration was necessary to confirm two things: that our GFP reporter worked and that our method of microscopy analysis was valid. In order to confirm that our GFP based promoter and it's mutant ACG GFP protein functioned properly, we needed flow cytometry data on how much our normal GFP and mutant GFP fluoresced when compared to a non-altered eGFP protein. Secondly, we needed flow cytometry to confirm that the measurement method we used to analyze our fluorescing cells (imaging the cells at set exposure lengths) using a program that measured fluorescence values of the image, was a valid method of obtaining data.
Results of our Flow Cytometry collab are shown below.
The flow cytometry data gathered from the BU Wetlab team confirmed the differential expression of the GFP protein between the normal ATG GFP and our ACG GFP mutant. The collaboration also confirmed that our fluorescent microscopy technique for analyzing our cells was also valid, as the flow cytometry data closely matched the data from microscopy.
For our contribution to their lab work, we provided microscopy visualization of the transfections that they had done. We analyzed the fluorescence of several of their reporter proteins to confirm their findings. Specifically, we analyzed cells expressing different combinations of GFP,RFP, and BFP. Each set of cells was analyzed for green, red, and UV level fluorescence and their images were sent back to the Boston University Wetlab team for analysis.
William and Mary
We used and adapted activities from the William and Mary 2015 Synthetic Biology Teacher's Curriculum for our community outreach events at TouchTomorrow and the Women in Science camp. We created a document on how we modified some of the procedures to better fit a larger crowd and to make it more quantitative. We sent this document to the William and Mary team to provide insight into how their handbook could be adapted for a larger crowd instead of a strictly classroom setting. The report that was sent to the William and Mary team can be found here .
Rice University
A few of our team members answered questions for the Rice University team's community outreach campaign of Humans of Synthetic Biology, which may be featured on their Facebook page.
Columbia University
We answered a survey about mosquito repellent that they tweeted.
